More on Last Week’s Grant in No. 06-1037, Kentucky Retirement Systems v. EEOC

Posted Wed, October 3rd, 2007 12:34 pm by Ben Winograd

The following summary was written by Eric Dreiband, a partner in the labor and employment section at the Akin Gump office in Washington, D.C.

In Kentucky Retirement Systems v. EEOC, the Supreme Court will review a Sixth Circuit ruling that the EEOC showed a prima facie case of age discrimination in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA).The Court will decide whether a benefit plan providing lower disability benefits, or denying disability benefits, to workers who are old enough to qualify for ordinary retirement benefits violates the ADEA as amended by the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act (OWBPA).

Charles Lickteig, a Deputy Sheriff for Jefferson County, was denied disability benefits because he was old enough to qualify for normal retirement benefits.Lickteig filed a charge of discrimination with the EEOC, which subsequently filed charges alleging the Kentucky Retirement Systems (KRS) plan denied or paid fewer disability retirement benefits to older individuals because of age in violation of the ADEA.

The plan at issue offers disability retirement benefits only to employees not eligible for normal retirement benefits.For example, employees in hazardous positions who have worked at least 20 years or have reached age 55 and become disabled in the line of duty may only receive the normal retirement benefits they would otherwise be entitled to.The disability benefits plan guarantees monthly payments of at least 25% of monthly final rate of pay and provides additional benefits for dependent children.These benefits are not available to an employee who becomes disabled after reaching normal retirement age.The disability plan also attributes additional years of service to younger workers when calculating benefit levels such that younger workers get credit for the years of service they would have worked prior to normal retirement if they had not become disabled.The result, according to the Sixth Circuit, is that "[i]n every case, a worker younger than normal retirement age (55/65) who retires on disability will receive more benefits each year than an older employee who retires from the same job, with the same disabling condition, length of service, and final compensation, who becomes disabled after reaching [retirement age] and must take normal retirement."

Kentucky Retirement Systems (KRS), the state of Kentucky, and the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department asked the Court to review the Sixth Circuit's holding that the EEOC established a prima facie violation of the ADEA because the plan was "facially discriminatory."The petition noted that using age and years of service as factors in determining benefits is not necessarily discriminatory and argued that a benefits plan only violates the ADEA if distinctions based on age are "arbitrary."The petition asserted that the KRS disability retirement benefits are intended to provide disabled employees with a replacement for the normal retirement benefits that he or she can no longer earn, and that therefore denying those benefits to workers who are already old enough to qualify for normal retirement benefits does not constitute "arbitrary" age discrimination based on ageist stereotyping in violation of the ADEA.

The EEOC's opposition brief disputed the petition's interpretation of the ADEA and noted that the Second, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits have recognized a prima facie ADEA violation when ruling on analogous benefits plans.The brief asserted that the KRS plan is facially discriminatory and that no improper stereotyping or discriminatory motive is needed for a prima facie ADEA violation.The brief also emphasized the OWBPA, which was a Congressional response to a Supreme Court case analyzing a similar benefit plan structure.(Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio v. Betts (1989)).The OWBPA clarified that the ADEA prohibited age discrimination in employee benefit plans even without evidence of discriminatory intent.

The petitioner's and respondent's briefs due Nov. 5 and Dec. 3, respectively.

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.